(2021-05-14) Ledgard Humans Need To Create Interspecies Money To Save The Planet

J.M. Ledgard: Humans Need to Create Interspecies Money to Save the Planet. A new form of digital currency for animals, trees, and other wildlife (no, not like Dogecoin) would help protect biodiversity and bend technology back to nature.

See Karl Schroeder's work and Ministry for the Future.

Nonhuman life forms may soon gain some agency in the world. I propose the invention of an Interspecies Money.

Because the services they ask for—recognition, security, room to grow, nutrition, even veterinary care—will often be provided by poor communities in the tropics, human lives will also be improved.

If money, as some economic theorists suggest, is a form of memory, it is obvious that nonhuman species are unseen by the market economy because no money has ever been assigned by them

The first requirement of Interspecies Money is to provide a digital identity of an individual animal, or a herd, or a type (depending on size, population dynamics, and other characteristics of the organisms)

Interspecies Money is Schrödingerian: A nonhuman life form will exist in an economic sense only when it is reliably observed.

At least with global warming the messaging is clear: Keep the increase in temperature within 2 degrees Celsius, or die. The biodiversity problem is much more muddled. Is the protection of nonhuman life about beetles or polar bears adrift? Or elephants? Or rainforests? Do we protect for rarity, for utility, for moral reasons, for beauty? Is it about equity? What about factory farm animals? How much life is enough?

An emerging consensus is edging towards the half-Earth future proposed by the Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson, in which half of the world is given over to nature. Many major economies now hold to the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity’s ambition: fully protect 30 percent of Earth by 2030 and sustainably manage another 20 percent.

The problem with the UN’s “30 by 30” approach is that it must compete with humans and human appetites. The biggest driver of the destruction of nonhuman life is the destruction of habitat.

Of course, Interspecies Money will depend upon a hundredfold or even a thousandfold increase in the amount of money flowing from richer countries to poorer countries for conservation

Interspecies Money will offer divisible payments for divisible tasks: the Schrödingerian observation of other life forms (a natural analog of cryptographic mining), but also providing security, building fences, removing waste, planting trees, controlling grazing animals, eliminating invasives, earning value from foraging and harvesting food and materials within the forest, policing zoonotic diseases, genomic prospecting for pharmaceuticals and advanced materials, and countless other tasks which together amount to a great regeneration machine.

For its launch, I propose the establishment of a new central bank, the Bank for Other Species, which will be mandated to build and regulate a digital currency for nonhuman life on Earth. I propose the currency be called the Life mark

It is not clear whether the proposed Bank for Other Species will be capitalized by a grouping of central banks, along the lines of the Swiss-based Bank for International Settlements, or if it will be a private sector alternative.